Ms Margie McCarthy:

Perhaps Ms Sheehan will talk about the feasibility work after me. The hypothetical stone cottage in west Cork is a good entry point. The heat study recommends and highlights the two key solutions to decarbonising our heat sector for homes in Ireland. The installation of heat pumps is likely to occur in detached, rural, oil-fuelled homes and district heating is more for homes in towns, villages and cities. The heat study looked at the costs. I spoke about heat density and we were at a much higher figure in that quite a big population demand was needed in a small area for it to be cost effective. What the heat study did was show us that we can actually cover much larger and less densely populated areas quite effectively with district heating. We can see this is being done really well across Scandinavian and Nordic countries.

To address some of the questions asked earlier, what is really important is that district heating is agnostic to the fuel type. We are not necessarily talking about being tied into any specific fuel. The advantage we have, and what we are seeing in Europe, is that district heating networks are not being affected by price fluctuations in the same way as we are being affected by being tied into various fossil fuel sources. That is a really important piece for us to learn from because we are starting out with district heating.

As Deputy Bríd Smith mentioned, we have some communal heating pieces. We do not have district heating at a large scale. We are just about to launch two new schemes in Tallaght and, I hope, Dublin city centre. These will show us how effective it can be to have decarbonised fuel sources in them.

What we have done in the heat study is use the information we had initially. We are now identifying how many candidate areas are available to us to get to the target of 2.7 TWh per year. That is our next step. If we think about it, that is a 2-D map. What we then need to do is look at the feasibility study, which involves considering whether there are rivers to cross and mountains to get over or whether there are real financial issues with a particular area. I will hand over to Ms Sheehan to speak about how we are supporting that feasibility work.